The Western Muhajirat of the Islamic State

No violent political organisation has recruited as many women foreign participants as the Islamic State, whose state-building project in Syria and Iraq attracted over 1,100 women and girls (Cook and Vale, 2019) from Western Europe, the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand between 2013 and 2016. Their role in the burgeoning society was primarily a supportive, domestic one, with most spending their days caring for their fighter husbands and raising their children to follow the IS’ ideology. Their participation was met with widespread alarm and confusion that were compounded by how violence is gendered (Elshtain, 1995; Enloe, 2014) and Islamophobic stereotypes about Muslim women (Martini, 2018). This thesis uses the wealth of data on IS members that has become available since the state-building project collapsed to explore women's motivations for joining violent political organisations. It uses a post-structuralist approach to agency to investigate how and why Western women joined the IS. Three empirical studies have been carried out which identify the main biographical characteristics of IS women, find differences and similarities with their male counterparts, and explore the role that beliefs about gender played in their decision to join. Though their roles have typically been read as "passive" and implied to be an imposition from male members they must liberate themselves from (Ahram, 2015a; Perešin, 2015a), IS women were motivated by the domestic roles they would carry out. They made a conscious decision to join the IS in these roles. They thus exist beyond binaries of passive supporters/active fighters that has until recently been reinforced in literature on women in violent political organisations.